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At the moment, I am reading documents pertaining to the Haida Gwaii village of Old Massett, and the decision of its Economic Development Office to seed the waters off its coast with iron. If you haven’t been paying attention lately, it’s been in the news a little bit. Like, around the world.

It’s a great story, and has everything going for it: weird and possibly dangerous science; a yawning cultural divide; hilarious financing; the whiff of snake oil.

The plan, as we now know, was to seed the waters off Haida Gwaii with iron, which would cause a phytoplankton bloom, which would attract salmon, which the Haida of Old Massett would catch as a source of income. A+B+C=$.

Or so was the plan. Then details dribbled out about initial efforts to sell the iron-seeding scheme as a carbon offset, which got no takers. Then scientists waded in to say the project was ill-advised, if not loopy.

In the wake of all this, and the subsequent news stories describing it, Old Massett’s economic development office has gone to ground. It has stopped returning calls, at least to us.

And when Sun reporter Gordon Hoekstra asked for an interview with Russ George, the American entrepreneur who worked with the Old Massett council on the iron-seeding project, he emailed back that there would have to be ground rules for an interview because The Sun had “evidenced its most scurrilous behaviour relentlessly.”

But despite the murk surrounding the project, some light is shed on it in the above-mentioned documents, the ones that I am reading. The naivety of the council and its advisors shine through.

One document is an application the Old Massett village council made to the Gwaii Trust Society. The Trust Society, among other things, doles out money to villages on Haida Gwaii from a fund set up for community development. Essentially, it’s the villages’ own money, but to receive it they must first justify its use.

On the application form, dated Mar. 2011, John Disney, the economic development officer of Old Massett, states the iron seeding project has a planned budget of $2.5 million, with $500,000 of that total to come from the Old Massett village vouncil. The remaining $2 million, he hoped, would come from the Gwaii Trust Society.

He then breaks down the budget. It includes:

• $1,412,830 for “Sea Ops.”

• $595,295 for “Marketing, admin, HR exp.”

• $341,875 for engineering.

• $150,000 for financing charges.

Two things about those numbers jump out. One is their vagueness. They wouldn’t pass muster at a lemonade stand. The second thing is their amounts. Almost $600,000 for marketing, administration and human resources? And $150,000 for financing charges? Why?

In the end, the Gwaii Trust ended up giving Old Massett $1,600,606. For funding allocations of over $100,000, the Trust was supposed to conduct three on-site inspections of the project, but none were done. Errol Winter, the Trust’s executive director, said that since the village population had voted in favour of the project, it was decided inspections were not needed.

Once the Trust money was granted, it appears — and I say “appears” because no one from Old Massett will verify it — the council used that money to secure a $2.5 million loan from the Northern Savings Credit Union.

Still, the credit union made clear its concerns about the project — it offered for perusal two pages of cautions, all the way from the dubious science of it to the avowed expertise of Russ George, of whom, the credit union pointed out, “there is conflicting information about his results.”

Despite all of this, Disney was over the moon about the deal. He considered it revolutionary. In an email to Winter, he wrote:

“The significance of this goes far beyond financing. For a (sic) Indigenous community in Canada today to put their faith and support AND FUTURE in this cutting edge project based on their faith in me and council and step out of the INAC (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada) box, is almost unheard of. History was made yesterday.”

There’s something awfully touching about that email, and we will have to wait for history to bear him out.

In the meantime, I would suggest it was history that led Old Massett to this pass. In our interview, Errol Winter and I talked about Old Massett, and he said the unemployment rate there was almost 70 per cent. The decimation of resource industries in the area had hit them hard, he said. People are desperate.

“It’s a hard life,” Winter said.

“They’re in a very tough position. When people tell them to think outside the box, that’s where they begin.”

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